Godus Community Update

Hello Kickstarter!

It's 2015 and it's time for our first update of the year after an adventurous few months here at 22cans. The Godus team are working hard to design, create and implement new features, bug fixes and work with the community to push Godus forward. It's all full steam ahead from now on!

Update 7 is just round the corner and it'll bring single player combat and Pavle's new battle formations into the mix. Pavle's been shouting about those a lot recently and we're all getting quite excited about it.

What exactly has happened between January and now?

In January, the team returned to studio after the Winter break and Konrad Naszynski stepped up to the role of Lead Designer for Godus and started his plans for the implementation of the story into Godus.

In February, the story of Godus found its way on to the Steam Opt-In. This covered the events of a past Deity learning about their powers and followers (The Astari). While the Steam Community didn’t seem too pleased with this, the 22cans team took your feedback and concerns on board and we're continuing to look into ways to redefine the way we deliver the story.

The team is a little smaller this year and this has raised concerns amongst some community members. We want to reassure everyone that we’re all fully committed to making Godus the game it deserves to be.

So who exactly is working on Godus?

Andy - Production

Andy is our Production Manager and has been in charge of the day to day team activities. He likes to make sure stuff gets done on time and the team have anything and everything they need in order to get the job done. Andy also manages all of the builds and releases to Steam and Mobile.

Konrad - Lead Designer

Konrad, the community member turned powerhouse designer, has recently been working on the combat design, producing relevant design documents and tweaking the story elements. We’ve also has some interest in Godus from Korea and Konrad has been hard at work making sure the localisation is correct.

Martin - QA Lead

Martin is the QA Lead on the Godus team and is forever testing, breaking and destroying the game. His daily tasks usually involve shouting at the other members for breaking Godus whilst regressing their issues and readying desktop and mobile builds for release.

Conor - QA & Community

Recently Conor has been working on the Zendesk support system, dealing with support tickets and interacting with our numerous Facebook community groups. Conor has also been writing up the proposal for the Art of Godus/Making of Godus Kickstarter reward and investigating printing options.

Richard - Programming

Richard is our newest edition to the development team has already broken the game once. He’s been squashing all of those pesky bugs that appear when you’re not looking, cleaning up all the builds of Godus and will soon be moving on to programming Combat features.

Pavle - Programming

Pavle is hard at work on Combat and this week we’ve all been woo’d by his impressive battle formations. Our daily development Twitch stream watchers are always on Pavle’s back for having a messy, food covered desk. So much so, that one member set up a petition to get Pavle to clean that unsanitary workplace. You can join the cause here: Pavle's Dirty Desk Petition

Fabs - Programming

Fabs has been doing what ever Konrad tells him to do. Which recently has involved with testing new rendering options and animations, work on the Combat update and working on something top secret. Shhh!

Dave - Community Manager

Our Community Manager Dave can often be found loitering around the Steam forums, our community boards and other social media channels. He has been updating the community with the Daily Development Activity on the 22cans website, generating our community reports and crying himself to sleep.

Onwards and upwards!

Moving forward, the team are busy implementing Combat for Update 7 which will be available soon on the Opt-in branch and Konrad has created a design document that we have decided to share in order to gather feedback and ideas from the community.

The first document we’re releasing details 'Phase-1' of a '3-Phase' combat implementation. This document focuses on Warbands, Unit Generation and Controls. It’s a 33 page PDF file and probably isn’t going to interest everyone, but feel free to have a look over it and tell us what you think!

Superbacker

What gave you the idea that what the game needed was MORE scripted content?

All the time and effort that's going into making crappy scripted content for casual mobile phone players, like story mode and the ever-useless voyages, could be going into making an actual, you know, proper GOD GAME.

Just give us a well rounded civilization builder with a so we can make our OWN stories.

I honestly couldn't give a toss about the guy who "won" a tapping on the screen competition and didn't get any money. All the cry me a river on Eurogamer for him is ridiculous when people, like me, stumped up money to get the game made and then haven't had what we were promised delivered.

Superbacker

Thanks for the update! It has obviously been a turbulent few months for everyone there - good to see that there is still some enthusiasm kicking around. Onwards and upwards and don't let the b*stards get you down....

Hey QA guy, how about your team looks into the bug I reported two months ago where the android tablet version has managed not only to bork my save games but all the Google Play backups forever this game unplayable on my account.

Oh and something something actually provide an update to the game something something.

Behold! Behold as I blow a raspberry of such magnitude that it tears the very fabric of the universe and reverberates through time. Behold as its droning echo becomes part of your existence on this day, all days that have ever passed, and all days that shall ever come to pass. Behold as your entire bloodline heeds to this boisterous alarum; every one of them at different times yet every one of them at once; from your most ancient ancestors to your most distant progeny; harkening to its cacophonous fanfare in adoration, castigation, desperation, exultation, exoneration, condemnation, jubilation, and lamentation.

Oh, and Peter made it pretty clear he had moved on the the next "game" during his little melt down where he got upset that the gaming media and community called him out for totally running this into the ground while simultaneously lying through his teeth about the grandiose reward inside the "curiosity cube". Meanwhile the actual winner is going about his very unchanged life with the only difference being he has a lot less respect for peter & Co after the way he was treated out there.

@Claude - Peter has never been an active developer on the game. He is the "ideas" guy. Look at his credits from past games and you'll see he hasn't been involved in the day to day of a game in a very long time. Possibly one reaosn why his ideas are so out of touch with the reality of the games....

A "secret" project on the programmers side? Oh I hope I hope that it's a complete redo of the way the entire game plays. Maybe it can be remade to not be boring as hell this time. Maybe things like gems and stickers can be totally thrown out the window and into the trash where they belong. Boiling most resources down to arbitrarily obtained stickers was one of the stupidest ideas I have ever seen in a god game. I think the only idea worse than that is adding gems to a game that was never supposed to be pay-to-play, and "fixing that by adding the ability to earn the gems through sacrifice.

Do you guys realize how inefficient the process is? Lets say I want gems because I am low on faith.

So I use my leash spell to leash up ten people. Each person I leash costs me 100 faith, so I just spent 1,000 faith. I then send them all to my temple. They jump in. I'm lucky if they all jump in and some don't get lost or confused along the way. Now I have 10 gems and I have to wait anywhere between a few minutes to half an hour depending on if those people lived on sand or grass. Now, IIRC, 10 gems buys me 2,000 faith. But hey, I just spent 1,000 faith to get those 10 gems. So I have a net gain of 1,000 faith PLUS a timer telling me I need to wait between 5-20 minutes to replace my peoples.

The more I sacrifice, the more faith I spend on leash, and the longer my population timers take to repopulate my city. Now, I use some of the faith I just earned to do it again, which means I have diminishing returns (unless I had enough faith up front for all of my leashing needs). Essentially, I can do this over and over and over and I *might* get to around 20-25k faith. However now I hardly have anyone left, and I have to wait until this afternoon to have enough people to do anything with. That is piss poor game design. Molyneux states in his game commentary "there should never be a point where you have nothing to do". Well, I hate to tell you jackass, but apparently the majority (as in everyone except for those on the far end of the bell curve) is playing the game wrong, because there is exactly jack shit to do when playing this game most of the time.